Journeys: From Here to There to Back Again

June 2020

AW AMONG WORLDS

JOURNEYS From Here to There and Back Again

AMONG WORLDS

JUNE 2020 • VOLUME 20 • NUMBER 3

ARTICLES

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8 4 16 Journey in Artwork

Malik Dieleman

Immigration Sahil Babar

The Taste of Blackberries

Shangri-La (or Not)

Christine Kindberg

Tim Hoiland

32 22 Spotlight

Mimi Khalvati

The Exile Speaks of Mountains

From Here to There and Now Where?

Rachel Hicks

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John & Lynne Evans

Cover Photo courtesy of Pixabay.

So You Want to Go Back Home?

Marilyn R. Gardner

Journey in Photography

Stephanie Tea

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42 Full Circle

Naomi Hattaway

Choosing Home

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Rebecca Hopkins

TCK Definition

An individual who, having spent a significant part of the developmental years in a culture other than the parents’ cultures, does not have full ownership of any. Elements from each culture are incorporated into the life Addressing Home experience, but the sense of belonging is in relationship to others of similar experience.

Journey in Poetry Kerith Thomas

Hadassah Winters Lampron

50 Resilience

~David C. Pollock

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From the Director Keeping Your Feet Michael V. Pollock

Tim Sanford

Editor: Rachel Hicks Copy Editor: Riah Solomon Graphic Designer: Laurel Fleming Digital Publishing: Bret Taylor

The mission of Among Worlds is to encourage adult TCKs and other global nomads by addressing real needs through relevant issues, topics, and resources.

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Editor’s Letter

Journeys How ironic is this issue’s theme? Journeys—at an unbelievable moment in our collective memory in which hardly anyone in the whole world is able to “journey” anywhere! As I write this, my parents (whom you will meet in this issue) are “stuck” in Prague, my brother and his family are “stuck” in Hong Kong, and I am “stuck” in Baltimore, Maryland.

But maybe we’re not “stuck” at all. Maybe we’re right where we’re supposed to be on our respective journeys. As TCKs, don’t we often make these kinds of shifts in perspective quite fluidly? We’ve probably learned a thing or two about taking life interruptions in stride.

Wherever you find yourself right now—at this exact, strange moment in modern history—try to embrace the idea that you may be where you should be. It may be a world away from those you love most. You may not have been able to board that last flight out before the borders closed. Your loved ones may be stuck somewhere that doesn’t count as “home.” Perhaps you were planning a new journey, or a return journey, and it had to be cancelled.

Some of you got “stuck” in limbo, unable to return home when this crisis hit. You feel like you haven’t stopped journeying, and all you want is to curl up in your own bed again. That’s hard—it just is. Now is when your TCK skills of adaptability and

e We shall not cease from exploration and the end of all our exploring will be to arrive where we started…and know the place for the first time.

T.S. Eliot

creating your own comforts of home on the road will come into play. This long pause in your journey will eventually end. Sometime soon—we hope— we’ll all be actively “journeying” again. Won’t the airports and train stations feel deliciously welcoming and familiar?

I don’t think, though, that we’ll ever forget this season in which the world stood still. Let’s learn what we can in it and from it. Let’s let others more practiced in standing still teach us contentment in this interrupted time. We’re so good at journeying. But maybe some of us need to learn how to just be.

I’m thrilled to introduce you in this issue to poet Mimi Khalvati, who is featured in our Spotlight interview. Iranian-born but raised on the Isle of Wight, Mimi speaks about how she plays with Persian poetic forms in English lyric poetry, and how she has made discoveries about herself and her identity through her writing.

Other contributors in this edition help us to see old places with new eyes, to grow in resilience, and to deal with the complicated feelings that arise when we visit places we used to call home. And though it may seem far off for some of us, we’ll look at how adult third culture kids approach retirement when there is nowhere to call home.

May each of you be blessed and find solace and joy in these strange times.

Love,

Rachel Rachel Hicks EDITOR

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Shangri-La (or Not):

Seeing with New Eyes

By Tim Hoiland

A

s a missionary kid starved for For some families, furlough means American culture, to me there returning to some familiar place and were few words more enchant- staying put for a while. For our family of ing, more promising than five, it meant loading up a car and making “furlough.” a big squiggly loop around the United In Guatemala, where my parents States. My mom and dad grew up in were doing linguistic work in a remote the San Fernando Valley and the Pacific indigenous area, Northwest, respecwe didn’t own a tively, but they met TV. Nor did we in Dallas, Texas. have access to the So, when people Of course, internet. Most of would ask, we never what I knew about knew where to American culture say we were from. the town hadn’t changed. had come from Which meant that during all-too-infrequent I had. furlough, we’d furloughs.

The always cover a rest would come lot of ground. from classmates Visits to far-flung who would return to the international school in Guate- family and friends would take us from mala City after their own summers up the Santa Monica Pier all the way north. From them, I’d pick up on the to the Jersey Shore—sometimes in a latest in American fashion, sports, and single summer. By my teenage years, I’d already set foot in some thirty-five states. pop culture.

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Usually we flew to Dallas, where we’d buy a used station wagon or minivan.

But in the summer of 1995, when I was twelve, my parents decided we’d drive up through Mexico. Our Toyota Hilux had served us well on Guatemala’s mountain roads with those endless switchbacks and occasional mudslides. (There’s a reason the Hilux is the pickup of choice for missionaries and terrorists alike.) But for a summer-long road trip with my brother, sister, and me crammed in the back, there were some serious drawbacks. Like navyblue vinyl seats that our legs would stick to. Oh yeah, and no air conditioning.

Our journey through Mexico took a few days. But the unrelenting heat—and the stomach bug I picked up from a questionable club sandwich—made it feel a lot longer than that. By the time we crossed into McAllen, Texas, I was starting to feel better—in more ways than one.

The first thing I noticed that evening was the freeway. It was so wide and smooth and well-lit! We stopped at a supermarket, where I marveled at all the options—an entire aisle for cereal! Fifty brands of toilet paper! Then we made our way to a motel with a swimming pool, air-conditioning, and, wonder of wonders, ESPN. To me, this was Shangri-La. When I turned on the TV, I navigated to the sports channel I’d heard so much about. I’ll never forget what I first saw: Ken Griffey, Jr.—a superstar I knew only from baseball cards—crashing repeatedly into the outfield wall. In replay after replay, the Mariners centerfielder fell to the ground in pain, but somehow held onto the baseball.

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well be a verb, because the next morning we were back on the road. That summer, the O.J. Simpson trial was underway. And the country was reeling from the Oklahoma City bombing, carried out by someone who shared my name. I was vaguely aware of both events. But for me, the people and places we were encountering took center stage.

On Memorial Day, we went swimming in a lake in the Texas hill country.

At Carlsbad Caverns in New Mexico, we learned the difference between stalagmites and stalactites. We stood at the edge of the Grand Canyon and passed through the vast Mojave Desert. In Southern California, my parents spoke at the church where I’d been baptized.

A month in, we pulled into my grandparents’ house in Snoqualmie, Washington, east of Seattle. Here we’d have a chance to relax for a few weeks. There was a family reunion. We played ping pong and picked blackberries. On an island in the Puget Sound we collected sand dollars.

Grandpa taught me (in vain, I’m afraid) to play chess. And each evening, I’d watch the Mariners game on TV with Grandma.

I loved these daily rhythms.

But before we could say Snoqualmie, the time had come to get back on the road. Winding our way first east, then south, we explored lakes and waterfalls,

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saw mountains and meadows. We drove through a herd of buffalo at Yellowstone, experienced snow flurries at Beartooth Pass, ate donuts at the summit of Pikes Peak.

Finally, sometime in August, we closed the loop. We were back in McAllen. It was the same border town, the same motel, the same grocery store.

But I couldn’t believe my eyes. The water in the motel pool was scuzzy. The oncegleaming supermarket seemed cramped and dingy. And the town as a whole?

Nothing to write home about. What had happened to this place?

Of course, the town hadn’t changed. I had.

In Marcel Proust’s words, “The real voyage of discovery consists not in seeking new landscapes, but in having new eyes.”

At the start of the summer, McAllen had been the first stop in a dream world, a land of endless possibilities. It was the gateway to a big country I sort of belonged to but didn’t truly know.

But after a full, whirlwind summer of open roads, national parks, baseball games, and family reunions, I was seeing McAllen with new eyes. This border town had become the gateway to somewhere else. It symbolized a return to life as usual. And I wasn’t quite ready for that.

I never begrudged my parents for our And then there’s the enduring gift life. I saw their calling as a noble, worth- of friendship. In recent years, my wife while one. I still do. But I was acutely and I have returned to Guatemala to aware of Guatemala’s support community nuisances and depridevelopment work vations. It would be there. During those It’s good to belong to several years before visits, we have stayed a community of people whose I’d come to see my with old family friends childhood with grathearts and minds will always be in the western highitude and wonder, lands where I once mixed with hearthyphenated—between cultures, lived. And back in the break for Guatemacapital, we share meals between places, la’s wounds—and with some childhood the ability to name friends from the interbetween worlds. my own. national school. Most That furlough in of my classmates left the summer of 1995 was a gift. But as I Guatemala after graduating, but many would later come to see, so was our life in have now moved back, choosing to raise the Land of Eternal Spring (as Guatemala their own families there. is called). Turns out, America doesn’t As different as our lives may seem, have a monopoly on natural and cultural the bonds between third culture kids are treasures. real. It’s good to belong to a community I would always be able to say I had of people whose hearts and minds will lived in an adobe house on a mountain always be hyphenated—between cultures, ridge at 9,000 feet. Or that I’d climbed an between places, between worlds. Because active volcano, explored ancient Mayan if we’re honest, we wouldn’t have it any ruins, and vacationed at a lake so beauother way. tiful Aldous Huxley considered it “too Tim Hoiland is communications director much of a good thing.” Or that living among subsistence farmers had taught me at 1MISSION, a community development organization working in Mexico and Central more about tenacity, resilience, and hope America. He grew up in Guatemala and now than one could ever learn in a book. lives in Tempe, Arizona.

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T

he day I went back to Metrenco, Chile, it was sunny—bright enough to need sunglasses, warm enough to tie my jacket around my waist. When my flight left Chicago, it was the tail end of a winter that got so cold it was possible to get frostbite within five minutes of going outside. As the plane wing pointed out the first rays of morning emerging behind the Andes, I was arriving in summer. It was my first time back to Chile in over twenty years. People had warned me that returning to my childhood home might be a disappointment. Places change, they said. Buildings get torn down; fields get paved and become parking lots. The people you cared about move away. It will never be the same as you remembered.

But even if nothing was left, I wanted to stand in the place that had shaped my

childhood. I wanted to be there again, in Metrenco, to see what had become of that house and the trees and the fields I left when I was nine. We moved eleven times in four countries before I turned eighteen.

This house in Chile was the place I’d lived longest, the first place I remembered, before I realized I could never fully belong anywhere. It was the last place we’d lived where I didn’t think about how we would eventually have to leave. This was where I learned to ride a bike on gravel roads, where I spent hours climbing trees and playing Barbies, reading in a hammock, and playing pretend with my brother and our neighbors and my dog.

This was the home I revisited when asleep. The little wooden house surrounded by pine trees and bamboo thickets, hemmed in by barbed wire fences woven with blackberry brambles.

The

Taste of

Blackberries

By Christine Kindberg

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In my dreams I could still run through the orchard, past the guest house, down the field toward the tall, conical tree we called the Rocketship Tree. Sometimes I climbed the tree again. Sometimes I found myself unable to move, just standing there, staring at it.

I convinced my brother to go with me. My brother, an Anglican priest and church leader, had a conference in Santiago at the beginning of April, so I talked him into flying down a few days early to visit our childhood home with me.

I arrived in Chile a week before he did. Through Facebook, I’d gotten in touch with one of my closest friends from elementary school, who was now living in the capital city with her husband. The plan was that Carla and I would meet in a metro station and go get coffee. As I arrived in the station, I realized my phone didn’t work underground, and I panicked—at which exit would she be waiting? How would I recognize her?

Would she recognize me?

But then there she was: she couldn’t be anyone else but the adult version of the nine-year-old who had been my friend.

Carla and I talked for hours, laughing and serious by turns, remembering stories from when we were kids. How we’d dressed in matching homemade costumes for a school performance. The games we’d played at my birthday parties. How her younger sisters would follow us everywhere when I went to her house to play.

The friends we played with in Sunday School. The adventures we had when I joined her family for vacation.

She told me about how she was left out of our former friend group after I moved,

and how she eventually switched schools because of it. I told her how hard it was to adjust to life in the US, and how hard it was to move to Panama two years later.

She told me about studying law and what it was like to be a public defender in Chile. I told her about studying English and writing and what it’s like to work as an editor.

She’d taken the afternoon off from work to meet me, and she made us dinner as we talked into the evening. Despite my initial worries about what it would be like to see her again, I was glad to find she was someone I would have wanted to be friends with if we met today.

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Then I flew to Temuco, in south-central Chile. Through the plane windows, the trees and fields became more and more familiar. I spent the night with family friends, retelling more memories, amazed at how much they remembered from my childhood. Then I picked up my brother from his flight, and we drove twenty minutes to Metrenco.

The highway had been redone— it was more streamlined and smooth—and the exit was at a different place than it had been. Still, once we got off the highway, we knew where we were. We traced remembered landmarks until we found the old road we used to take every day to and from our school in the city.

Yes, there was the railroad crossing where my mom’s Jeep was hit by a train because there was no stop guard and she couldn’t see around the bushes. There was the convenience store we sometimes walked to, next to the house that had a dog that bit someone—was it me? Was it my brother? There was the school with the basketball court out front where we sometimes came to play. The basketball court hadn’t changed a bit.

The gravel road was the same too— nicer gravel, maybe—in the section where new neighborhoods had been built on either side of the road. I didn’t remember it being as far of a drive down that road.

But surely that was the dairy farm that was next door to us, with the neighbor who brought us bottles of milk fresh from his cows, milk neither my brother nor I had wanted to drink.

And there was our gate. It now had a sign saying Koyamentu, announcing what was now a church retreat center.

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This was the home I revisited when asleep.

Gone was the gatehouse where the groundskeeper used to live, but the drive was still lined with eucalyptus trees.

I turned into the two-track road, feeling like I was driving into a memory.

I drove slowly, shaking, tears just behind my eyelids, wide-eyed as I tried to take it all in. How could it be that I was there?

How could it be real? Was I sure that this time I wasn’t dreaming?

I remembered this bend, where the eucalyptus ceded to bamboo thickets where we’d built forts and mapped out passageways. I remembered this other bend, approaching the beet field. This was the stretch of road where our dad used to let us sit on his lap and steer the car.

There was the cow pasture we would walk across to visit our neighbors. There were the blackberry brambles, still clinging to the barbed wire fence.

We parked and walked to the wooden house that had been ours. A man came out to meet us, the caretaker who lived there now. He told us we could walk around all we wanted, but he didn’t invite us in. I told myself that was okay; it was mostly the outside I remembered, anyway.

I didn’t ask if there was still brown shag

carpet and if the room on the back left still had soft pink walls. I’m sure it didn’t.

As we walked around, my brother and I kept pointing and remembering.

There was the thicket where we once found the stone carving our dad destroyed because he thought it was an idol. There was the ledge where we would hop onto the stilts our dad made for us. There was the tree where we had a tire swing. There was the field where we set up goal posts to play soccer.

We walked past the guest house, through the orchard, down the field toward where the Rocketship Tree had stood. The tree wasn’t there anymore. We couldn’t agree on where, exactly, it had been; there weren’t any indications left.

Do you remember—we asked—how high we’d climb? How the bottom branches were like a spiral staircase? How there was a certain branch we pretended was a motorcycle? Another branch we challenged each other to jump from?

My brother told me he used to dream of Chile, too.

We kept walking until we reached the woods. We explored again the thicket where we’d had trails and hideaways. The sunlight filtered through the bamboo shoots, casting long, thin shadows that crisscrossed our faces. It was past season for copihues, but there: high above us, on that vine clinging to the trunk of an old tree—a splash of cardinal red in a trumpet shape. The Chilean national flower—so rare it doesn’t grow anywhere else on earth.

And there, in the shadows of the woods, was a blackberry bramble that still had berries, as if they’d been waiting for us. I had no basket—I wasn’t collecting them for any pies my mother had in mind—and so I ate as many as I could find. They stained my fingers purple, and they tasted just the way I remembered, as sweet as familiar laughter.

The memory box that hangs on my wall in the Chicago suburbs now holds a black rock I picked up from the gravel in Metrenco, and I keep up with Carla on Instagram.

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I haven’t dreamed about Chile since I visited. Now, when I think about the place, the new memories I have of going back are stronger than my memories of the loss I felt when leaving.

Now, I remember how my brother and I roamed the woods where we’d grown up, and how we sat and talked about our childhood, about the things we’d lost when we’d left, about how our family is and who we are because of it, how grateful we are to have grown up surrounded by woods and fields.

Now, I take comfort from the fact that I know there are still copihues growing high up in the trees, where they always did. And I’m glad there are still blackberries growing along the barbed wire fence and in the woods, where they still taste sweeter than a dream, better than blackberries from anywhere else in the world.

Christine Kindberg grew up in Peru, Chile, Panama, Kentucky, and North Carolina. She works as a Spanish-language editor at Tyndale House Publishers and is the author of the novel The Means That Make Us Strangers. https://ChristineKindberg.com https://www.amazon.com/Means-That-Make-Us-Strangers/dp/1797761358 https://instagram.com/christine.kindberg

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Third Culture: A Home This drawing was made to illustrate a poetry book, Third Culture, which reflects on the third culture kid experience of the poet.

This drawing represents a home made up of elements from the various countries in which the poet lived.

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Malik Dieleman ar tist

Malik Dieleman was born in France to Canadian and American parents working as missionaries to North and West Africa. Having lived several years in France, Canada, and Senegal, and making frequent visits to family in Spain, Scotland, and the US, Malik feels privileged to have experienced so much of the world growing up. Today, he is working as a fine artist and photographer in downtown Toronto, Canada, often exploring themes of place and belonging. Please see more of his work at malikdieleman.com.

Borderless This collage combines images I’ve taken across three continents and seven countries, many of which I’ve called home. Together, elements of each place create a chaotic but blended landscape, depicting my complex, multicultural identity.

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SPOTLIGHT Poet Mimi Khalvati

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W

elcome to Spotlight, a regular feature of Among Worlds. Our goal in the Spotlight column is to highlight third culture kids in all ages and stages of life who are making a difference in the world. In this issue, we are honored to be able to introduce you to poet Mimi Khalvati. Born in Tehran and raised on the Isle of Wight, Mimi explores in her writing many themes that will be familiar to TCKs: identity, loss,

displacement, shallow roots, the power of names, and the limitations and glories of various languages. Her work has been translated into nine languages, and she is an award-winning poet with numerous publications and honors. In our correspondence, Mimi said that reading Third Culture Kids: Growing Up Among Worlds (Pollock, Van Reken) was “seminal” for her in helping her to better understand her life and her work. (All poems mentioned in the interview are available to read from her website.)

AW: I’ve noticed that you use quite a few images of growing things in your poetry: vines, leaves, bulbs, roots. Why do you think that is? Do you feel that you have “roots” and are able to grow and flourish in spite of or because of your mixed make-up of cultures?

Mimi: Although I’ve lived my life mostly in cities, I grew up on the Isle of Wight, which is a very small, rural, and pretty island off the southern coast of England.

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the natural world and am particularly drawn to small wayside things a child might stoop to, such as wild flowers and even weeds. Perhaps I feel I too have shallow roots but am also happy to take root anywhere, whatever the soil or site. I’m aware at the same time of the uprootedness of my background, having left my home country so young, and of the tenaciousness of my roots once I do settle down.

AW: In your poem “Nostalgia”, the speaker mentions being alone in a “dream of a dark planet.” This brought to my mind the common TCK sense of rootlessness, of never fully feeling at “home” in a particular place on this planet. Is this a concept you explore further in other poems? Have you found a sense of belonging in a particular culture or place?

Mimi: Many of my poems revolve around the idea of home and belonging, both as a poet and as a woman and mother. Since I can’t read or write Farsi, my mother tongue, I only write in English and very much within the English lyrical tradition. But my subject matter is often Iranian, drawing on memories of my few years there as a young adult, writing about my family whom I have always felt close to, even though they were so distant. So the duality is always there. Culturally, linguistically, and in my writing, I feel very much at home here in London, but in my body, my sensibilities, and physical being, I am more Iranian. I don’t feel this as a mind/body split though; it’s more like two colours merging to make a new colour.

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AW: Your poem “Ghazal: It’s Heartache” is a thoughtful read for global nomads.

Does khalvati really mean “a quiet retreat,” or did I misread that reference?

Can you talk a little bit about your name and what it means to you?

Mimi: Yes, you’re quite right. Khalvati literally does mean “a quiet retreat.” The adjective khalvat means quiet, secluded, but the noun khalvati also means a Sufi or spiritual retreat. I learned this quite late in my life, at the time that I was writing this poem, and was very excited at the discovery as it rescued me from the embarrassment of the ghazal’s “signature couplet,” in which the author has to mention her/himself by name or pseudonym. I’d never previously had any real emotional connection to my patronymic but have subsequently felt a much stronger sense of ownership. And it’s a good name for a poet!

AW: Is there a particular reason why you have written several ghazals? Does your attraction to that form have any relation to your cross-cultural life and identity?

Mimi: Yes, my attraction to the ghazal is definitely due to my (lost) Persian heritage, as it is an old Persian form of love song with a monorhyme and refrain, still popular both as song and as poem across Eastern languages and cultures. Many American and British poets have taken to it too and are finding ways of writing ghazals in an Anglophone idiom. Poetry is so dear to the hearts of Iranians, many of whom can recite reams by heart, and I have always wondered how medieval

Click here to purchase Mimi’s book, Afterwardness.

poetry is kept so fresh and alive and still relevant to their daily lives. Exploring the form of the ghazal was in part my way of asking that question, as well as my wanting to bring over into English poetry some of the rhapsodic and musical expressions the ghazal offers.

etc. I have little sense of my own life story and sometimes rely on friends to remember my life for me! But we live in an age of mass migration and displacement, at a time when telling one’s own story, creating a platform for it and being heard, is so personally and politically urgent. In lyric poetry, however, I have found a place, or a home, which legitimises and allows for lack of memory, story, or narrative. The lyric void a poem occupies mirrors the void at the centre of my life, in which float all the key words you have mentioned: home, belonging, roots, culture, identity. Through poetry, I have been better able to accept their ambiguity and to value my life for the richness of its texture, its cross-fertilisations and connections. I feel a strong connection with the many people—TCKs, immigrants, exiles — whose experience in some ways might mirror mine.

AW: Is there a poem of yours that you’d like to share with us that speaks specifically to TCKs in some way?

Mimi: My most recent collection, Afterwardness, explores the long-term effects of early displacement and loss and takes many of its themes from the TCK bible, Third Culture Kids, and I am hugely grateful to the editors. Unresolved AW: What kinds of discoveries have you griefs, passivity, disassociation, emotional made about yourself and your place in this flattening, chameleon-like adaptability, world through your writing? hidden diversity—many of my sonnets touch on these aspects and, although Mimi: I have always felt ashamed at my they are largely autobiographical, I hope appallingly bad memory, particularly others will recognise and relate to them. biographical memory, and my inability to The title poem looks through the eyes of retain facts, dates, historical narratives, a young boy from Aleppo onto a symbolic JUNE 2020

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garden of paradise, a lost paradise, where language itself is lost, and all the early memories encoded within it.

AW: Describe what “home” means for you: is it a place—if so, where? What qualities does your “home” have that make it home for you?

Mimi: “Home” is in the heart of my family: my two children, grandchildren, living separately in our own homes, but bound together by love, shared histories, a common idiom, our sense of humour, range of references, and intimate knowledge of each other. “Home” is in the English language, in a community of poets, locally in London but also crossing international borders. “Home” is in my own flat, where I have lived nearly 30 years, and whose furnishings reflect my

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different senses of home—with many books, photographs, textiles, gifts given to me over the years, my mother’s paintings and tapestries, memorabilia, my archive of work. At the same time, “home” is always elsewhere, beyond the horizon, behind the sky, somewhere I dream of going to, but don’t know where.

AW: Given this issue’s theme of journeys, is there something you’d like to share about what journey or journeying means to you in your life?

Mimi: The word journey immediately summons up for me an image of airports.

I love airports (despite all the hassle of security) for their anonymity, passivity, the sense of being in a liminal space, in between time zones, neither here nor there. I love being freed of any sense of

obligation or expectation of individuality and definition. Afterwardness begins and ends with air travel: the first poem set on my first flight to England at the age of six, and the last, more than sixty years later, in the here and now, looking up at vapour trails.

Vapour Trails Staring up at pure blue from down on earth, we see them shining in the firmament, the jets, the contrails, gliding back and forth like deep sea fish, soundless and innocent.

Their exhaust particles and frozen vapours show us, graphically, cause and effect: in the silver bullet-nosed jets, the cause; in trails like spinal x-rays, the effect.

It only takes a trigger, a single flight in childhood, for example, early trauma, to stretch the bare bones of the aftermath into a lyric void beyond the finite and knowable, a via negativa cruising at altitude on plumes of breath‌ Reprinted by permission of Carcanet Press Ltd, Manchester.

To purchase Mimi Khalvati’s most recent collection, Afterwardness, please visit https://www.carcanet.co.uk/cgi-bin/indexer?product=9781784107994.

Learn more about Mimi and read some of her poetry at http:// www.mimikhalvati.co.uk/index.htm.

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From Here to There and No

S

o, after a lifetime of moving around internationally for work, where do you go when employed life is ending and “retired” life is about to begin?

When being an expat is your identity, do you find a way to stay home (internationally) or to go home (to your passport country)? How do you decide?

What priorities should guide your decisions? This is where we find ourselves in the spring of 2020, with many questions and few clear answers.

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A little context may be important. We both were born and grew up outside the United States (our passport country), came back for college, then left as soon as we could to begin our careers as international school teachers in northern India where I (John) grew up and felt was “home.” Our two children were born there in the foothills of the Himalayas.

In the years that followed we worked in nine more international schools in eight different countries, with occasional

stints in the United States, the longest being seven years at a prep school in central Ohio.

Now, after six years in the Czech Republic, we are retiring and are facing the question: “Where do we go from here?”

Third culture kids around the world have responded to this kind of situation in various ways. For some, being a perpetual foreigner is preferable to settling down in one’s passport country. Others are fine with living as “hidden immigrants,” willing to sumerge the parts of their intercultural identity that set them apart. Among the many factors that can go into a

John and Lynne Evans with children Rachel and Jeremy.

ow Where?

By John and Lynne Evans

TCK’s retirement decisions, here are some that currently influence our thinking.

Relatives are an important consideration. Time has a way of diminishing the number of one’s relatives (through the passage of grandparents, parents, uncles, and aunts) and of redistributing one’s priorities among those who are still with us. Years ago, we spent our summer vacations in Pennsylvania with our parents, getting together with relatives, attending weddings and family reunions, JUNE 2020

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The Czech people are great role models for how to thrive outdoors by biking, hiking, skiing, kayaking, and even mushroom gathering!

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and so on. Lynne’s parents’ place gave us all a sense of geographical rootedness, a place we could call home, even if temporarily. Eventually we even bought a small house in the countryside not far from them, never expecting that an impending evacuation from the Democratic Republic of Congo (then Zaire) would give our kids a clear impetus to call it “home.” And now those kids are grown with children of their own. We want to be a part of their lives whenever we can while still remaining connected to our extended family.

Location also plays a role in deciding where to live. Many of our overseas colleagues were born and grew up in North America.

Their families are still there. So, they have a place to return to that already was home, and relatives to go home to. Deciding which relatives to move close to is a bit more complicated for us. Lynne’s

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mother is in Pennsylvania, our son and his family live in Hong Kong, and our daughter and her family live in Baltimore, Maryland. Two of our siblings live in the Washington, D.C., area, one is in Ohio, and the other is in Mumbai, India. Our family is literally all around the world! One attraction of staying where we are now is that we are physically located somewhere in between where we can host an occasional European vacation for family members who want to visit.

Quality of life is another factor. Retiring in the United States will mean taking time to thoughtfully engage in finding community. It also will mean the need to psychologically retool our TCK identity in order to immerse ourselves in the dominant culture of American life. After spending the bulk of our careers in Asia and Africa, we finally decided to go to Europe—to the only European country we ever really wanted to consider, the Czech Republic. Here we have come to appreciate certain advantages that retiring in this country could bring. Health insurance is remarkably affordable and medical care is excellent. Public transport is among the best in the world and free for us as we are

counted among the “elderly.” We can walk everywhere—to the stunning heart of Old Town Prague, to national forests, to expansive parks—all within minutes from our home. The Czech people are great role models for how to thrive outdoors by biking, hiking, skiing, kayaking, and even mushroom gathering! Often, even on days when we are still working, we will walk five to eight miles. For us, it’s the perfect form of exercise. The one thing we still need to do though, if we decide to stay here, is to get serious about learning Czech—not an easy language to learn!

Cost of living is an important consideration. Having lived an itinerant life in expat communities where housing was always provided or subsidized, we are leaning towards renting rather than buying. Owning a house or apartment often means that “it owns you.” It can tie you down. We like to travel and want the flexibility to do so while we are still relatively young and healthy. Even with higher taxes, the Czech Republic is an attractive option because rents are comparatively lower here than many apartments we have looked at in the United States. We have good reason to believe our retirement income will stretch farther than it will in the United States.

So, it appears by now that we are leaning towards staying where we are—at least for a while. Wherever we start retirement is likely to be temporary. The first year we will focus on what is important to us, on learning to manage our new life, on looking for avenues to stay connected with others, and on finding ways to serve in our

community, meeting needs with our time, interests, and talents.

Perhaps we should be a bit nervous, especially with COVID-19 suddenly raising new challenges and concerns. But looking back over the trajectory of our lives and work, we are able to see how we have been blessed by many friendships, diverse experiences, and protection by the guiding hand of God. Thousands of years ago, King David wrote, “If I ride the wings of the morning, if I dwell by the farthest oceans, even there your hand will guide me and your strength support me” (Psalm 139:9-10). Could he have had any idea of the encouragement that his words would give to two retiring TCKs in 2020?

The son of missionaries, John Evans grew up in India, attending Woodstock School through Grade 11. Born in Indonesia, Lynne spent her early years in Dutch New Guinea where her father was a mission pilot in the Baliem Valley. Later, she attended and graduated from Dalat School in Malaysia. The two TCKs had much in common when they met at Geneva College and subsequently got married. Since starting their overseas teaching careers in 1975, John has served primarily as a high school counselor and Lynne as an IB Economics teacher. They have been privileged to work with a wide spectrum of students in India, Pakistan, Jordan, Democratic Republic of Congo, Hong Kong, Morocco, the United States, Bangladesh, China, and the Czech Republic. John and Lynne are the parents of Among Worlds editor Rachel Hicks.

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So Y “B

Going back is a critical part of your story.

Embrace it— don’t waste it.

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I realize I have always belonged everywhere at once: on the road; in liminal spaces…I have always belonged at the beginning of the world, and where it seems to end, where the sky meets the sea, where the sea meets the land, on a plane when the two become indistinguishable from one another and you can no longer tell if you are going home or leaving it.1

You Want to Go Back Home?”

By Marilyn R. Gardner

T

here comes a time in the lives of most adult third culture kids, many expats, as well as immigrants and refugees when they want to go “home.” Sometimes it’s after a short time of living away; other times it’s after years, but always it comes with a sense of great anticipation coupled with a strong shot of fear.

What is it like to go back home? How does it feel? How should I prepare? There is no stock answer to this, but perspectives from adult third culture kids who have gone back to visit can help.

The Familiar and the New When I stepped off the plane in Pakistan in 2010, years after I had graduated and then lived there as an adult, it was all so sweetly familiar. My heart broke with the beauty of familiarity. This is the place

I knew and loved, the familiar smell of chapatis and curry; the beautiful sound of the call to prayer; the sounds of childhood through Urdu and Sindhi speakers; the heat and beauty of bright fuchsia bougainvillea—all of it was so sweetly beautiful.

But as we were driving from the airport and rounded a corner, I suddenly saw the newness of everything: new buildings, roads, bridges, and restaurants. And then the new things that were not pretty.

There was a massive garbage pile of bright, pastel-colored plastic bags and my heart sank with the sadness of waste marring what used to be empty land and palm trees.

It was the familiar and the new, such a visual representation of the paradox of being a third culture kid; the conflict of replacing the old memories with new experiences.

Be prepared to hate that you are “just visiting.”

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When you have lived in a place, it is incredibly difficult to “just visit.” It feels so wrong. We were visiting Cairo when I first remember someone asking me “Do you live here, or are you just visiting?” My heart felt the crushing weight of lost place and with it, lost identity.

It was in Cairo that we had watched three of our five children take their first steps. It was in Cairo where our youngest two were born, three years apart. It was our community in this city that had loved us and cared for us through pregnancies and sickness, through post-delivery chaos and family crises, and through packing up and leaving when the time came. The apartment we lived in still had markings of our children’s measurements on the doorpost. We had seen these just a day before while with our friends.

Cairo had been home for a long time, and it broke our hearts to leave. We said goodbye to all those things we loved so deeply. Rides in huge, wooden boats called feluccas on the Nile River; Egyptian lentils (Kosherie) with the spicy tomato sauce and crispy fried onions to top it off; friendships that had been forged through hours of talking and doing life together; a church that was one of a kind with people from all over the world.

So, when the woman asked me the question, I didn’t know what to say. A lump came into my throat and I willed myself to hold back the tears. And then I did it. I said “Yes.” The words visit and live are worlds apart. Visit means stranger, tourist, one who goes and stays in a place for a “short time.” The dictionary definition is clear on this. It goes on to add “for purposes of sociability, business, politeness, curiosity…”

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By contrast, the word live means “to dwell, to stay as a permanent resident.”

The reality is that I no longer live in Pakistan, Egypt, or Northern Iraq. (Or Chicago or Phoenix). I live in Boston, Massachusetts. That is my legal address. I do not have permission to live or work in any of those other countries, and at times it hurts.

While in a sense we are going “home,” in another sense we are just visiting. We have changed, as have the places that we love so dearly. My daughter once wrote that we belong to these lands where we lived, but they do not belong to us. It may take me a lifetime to accept this beautiful, painful truth.

Understand that you may revisit feelings of grief and loss.

When an adult third culture kid or expat suddenly finds himself or herself a stranger, a visitor in a land they once claimed, the grief is acute and necessary.

There is no way around but through, and trying to avoid the reality is not helpful.

The grief that washed over me in Cairo the first time I returned was deep and I wanted to bury myself in it. I wanted to be able to grieve with abandon, to cry the tears I had wanted to cry since leaving two years prior. I wanted to cry tears that would water the dusty ground that surrounded me, ground that had not seen water for a long time. But I couldn’t— because indulging in the grief I felt at that moment would have taken me away from the place and people I loved.

The loss and grief that would come over me in waves when I visited Pakistan to work in flood relief was equally strong.

But those times were woven into so many precious times of joy and belly-aching

laughter, times of reconnecting and hearing stories from people I had not seen for years. I willed the grief away so I would not waste the present time.

Don’t waste your present visit by dwelling on grief from your past. The grief has to come, it needs to come, but enjoy each moment, because that visit will be over all too soon. And the visit from the present may help heal some of the grief from the past.

Take the experience and weave it into the rest of your story.

This is your story! Claim that story, map your journey, embrace the in-between. We are so incredibly lucky to have these complex stories. No, we don’t always feel lucky, but with so much of the world facing displacement, we understand this era when others cannot.

We can give empathy while others are silent in confusion. In the words of Anna Badkhen: “This is a century of dislocation not merely of body and home, but also of empathy, dignity, compassion.” We can be the people who take our feelings of displacement and use them to build

bridges, to connect to others who are displaced, to find our voice in a world where people are lonely for connection.

Going back is a critical part of your story. Embrace it—don’t waste it. Because this I know, and I know it well: more difficult than a visit would have been no visit at all. Far harder than facing my current reality would have been dreaming of the past in a country far removed and never getting to experience my beloved places again.

“The Story is not over; the journey continues….Somedays it feels as though it is still just beginning.” 2 Osman, Jamila, A Map of Lost Things: On Family, Grief, and the Meaning of Home.

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Gardner, Marilyn, Worlds Apart: A Third Culture Kid’s Journey.

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Marilyn R. Gardner is an ATCK who grew up in Pakistan and has lived in Egypt, Kurdistan, and the United States. She is the author of three books and hosts the blog Communicating Across Boundaries.

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Immigration: One Family’s Story

By Sahil Babar

M

y father was a young village kid from Peshawar, Pakistan, until he got the opportunity to turn his future around and start fresh. Going to school was his favorite thing. The knowledge he gained was a whirlwind for him. He worked as hard as he could to make something of himself, and it surely paid off when he was given the opportunity to go to the United States of America. He was a student and professor in university, but his ethnicity and heritage made him very different from all his fellow peers. He faced racism and bullying, yet that didn’t stop him from focusing on what he needed to do. His main goal was to bring to America his wife and My family’s immigration story is kids, whom he had to leave behind like many others, but it still has in Pakistan until they were granted the power to show how families entry into the US. We were finally are stretched across many granted visas to join him, and we pinpoints around the world. moved halfway across the world to be reunited. My mom had never gone outside her country, let alone over the Atlantic Ocean—this was all completely new for her.

Me being a very young child, I couldn’t comprehend as much—it all seemed to come naturally to me in this new environment, but for my mom it surely did not. This was a country where she didn’t speak the language and she didn’t understand the culture.

“These white people!” she said, when she didn’t understand why some Americans hated her so much—why her skin complexion seemed to enrage so many on the New York subway.

“ “

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Just the sight of her had eaten away at their entrapped minds.

Yet she knew that, despite all this passing judgement, this was the place for her children to be raised. Here they could find opportunities to be whoever they dreamed of being.

My family’s immigration story is like many others, but it still has the power to show how families are stretched across many pinpoints around the world. Even though my father spent years without us next to him, he still had us locked away in his body and soul. Even though my mother had no one to take care of her kids with her, she still held onto the hope that things would change for the better.

Love is what holds us together.

The absence of it makes us feel empty and melancholic. A world without love is what we sometimes seem to be living in nowadays. There are debates,

so absent of love, surrounding immigration, that people don’t understand how families are being ripped apart at the border, snatched from their homes, taken to places of their heritage, but not their home or their country. They’ve made homes in places they ran to, not where they were running from.

Immigration is a solo journey, but it affects more than that single person.

Immigration is the aching my mom felt every night that her husband was not by her side. Immigration is the tears dripping down her face when they would video call, and she could not bear to see him far away. Immigration is the changing seasons which my mom and dad waited through, impatiently counting the days until they held each other again.

Sahil Babar’s immigrant family has lived in Peshawar, New York, and Prague. (Author below, far left)

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The Exile Speaks of Mountains

By Rachel Hicks

First published in Little Patuxent Review, Summer 2018 32

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In the Himalayan foothills during monsoon the electricity once stayed off for fifteen days. Every morning there was chai with sugar cubes and buffalo milk, delivered to our kitchen door in tin carafes strapped with thick ropes to a mule.

We kept warm by feeding the stove log after log and entertained by watching our spit sizzle on its tin top.

My brother held my hand on the trail to and from school, scanning for leopard scat or for thieving langur monkeys in the trees.

I write this from my brick colonial in Baltimore, decades removed, drinking black tea with thick cream and sugar— the heat of exile churning in my blood.

I drive an SUV, shop at Target, and fight tears at random moments, like when I open the door and enter the Punjab store down on 33rd, suddenly and viscerally at home among the turmeric and cardamom, the Neem soaps and steaming samosas under foil on the counter, while the kind owner offers a mango juice box to my daughter.

Only if I embrace this life as a perpetual pilgrim do I find solace in remembering the terraced cemetery in the Himalayan pines where the mute woman and her donkey guard the graves, the distant beat of tabla drums, the bounce of our flashlights on the trail walking home at night, thrill of leopards in the dark, the high peak of Bandarpunch to the north, glowing in moonlight.

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Returning Home

I

lived in America for eleven years before moving to Tianjin, China, for my middle school and high school education. Transitioning from homeschool to a private school, from home to a country across the world was quite an adjustment to say the least. However, my experiences gained while living abroad shaped me into who I am today and I am very thankful for them. Not only did I learn a lot about myself, but I

found God for myself and developed a wider perspective of the world we live in, which encouraged my love of travel.

I decided to study abroad in Australia, as a result, and that’s where this picture was taken. I think it is a reflection of the struggle that third culture kids face when either entering a new country or returning home. They start wondering where their home is and even if they do end up where they thought home was, it’s different.

Returning home is full of challenges, but ultimately home ends up being where your heart is and although that might not end up being where you are currently or where you thought it would be, it’s still home.

Stephanie Tea, photographer

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Choosing Home

by Rebecca Hopkins

Rebecca’s daughter, Renea, hangs from the jungle gym in their yard in Indonesia.

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T

he strangest part of our move back to America was the fact that we got to—and, I suppose, had to— choose our own house.

At this point in my life, the military no longer chooses it.

And the nonprofit organization with which we served for fourteen years in Indonesia wasn’t choosing it. It was up to us to choose. Ready or not.

I’ve enjoyed the many perks of not having to choose my many addresses. As an Army kid, I could leave my entire world as a child and move to another Army-assigned house in yet another state. All that was left for me to do was make friends with the kids, also just arrived from far-flung places, on the other side of the duplex.

Then, as an adult married to a jungle pilot, I could show up in a foreign country with only a handful of Rosetta-Stonetaught words. And someone would hand us the key to a house another expat had recently vacated—with a note on the kitchen counter that had directions to the nearest doctor.

Then it was up to me to make do with the proximity to the late-night karaoke club.

This time, though, we are leaving the big mission, the community that is like family, and all the choices they made for our family.

Sometimes this change feels like entering into a world of freedoms, possibilities, new breath. Sometimes, though, it feels like standing on the edge of a cliff, gasping for air.

As we house-hunted in Colorado Springs, everyone in our family had their wishes.

Our nine-year-old daughter asked for stairs. They’re rare and never carpeted in Indonesia—think stilted homes and planked steps. She learned to slide and bump down them at homes of family and friends on visits to the States, her laughter and curls bouncing behind her.

Our oldest son just wanted to be able to do sleepovers with his new friend. My youngest son told me he’s been building rainbows over his imaginary house in the video game, Happy Craft. Rainbows. Got it. Let’s tell the realtor.

My husband wanted affordability and something that wouldn’t fall apart on me when he’s gone on flights.

I’m still amazed that clean drinking water right out of the faucet isn’t listed on Zillow. Do Americans realize how nice that is? But I did mention—again and again to my husband—that I wanted to live right next door to my sister. For fourteen years, I’ve lived on the other side of the world from her. I missed her happiest moments, like her JUNE 2020

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wedding, and her worst moments, like the death of her child.

And if her neighbors were ridiculous and refused to sell to me, at least I wanted to live next door to a very welcoming Asian family who could cook (and possibly share with us).

I don’t know if I said this part out loud, but tucked deep inside me, I knew I wanted to live near something else, too. Beauty.

I’d gotten used to Asian beauty and its aroma of plumeria petals that I’d tuck behind my ear on days I felt fragile; its bright patterns on clothing at weddings; its sounds of bird calls and breezes through palm trees on cool(ish) mornings.

Beauty’s the easy part here in Colorado, too. Many houses have mountain views out their kitchen windows, and if they don’t, the nearby park and its biking trails do. And yet, for some reason, in the darkness of grieving a home I’d loved over there, I had a hard time truly hoping for beauty in my new life here.

I was trying hard to believe that these mountains could be mine, as my husband and I followed our realtor across town at sunset to check out the last of a handful of homes we’d “hearted” on the electronic list. My phone chimed. I pulled my gaze off the outline of Pikes Peak against an orange sky to check the message.

“In Palangkaraya, it’s already smoky season,” texted my former Indonesian neighbor from that Borneo town with the long name. “Many are burning their fields near our house. I already feel sick from the smoke.”

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see the world around me dim to gray.

Smoky season in Borneo and all its complexities were as big a part of my last few autumns as pumpkin spice is here.

I suddenly felt disconnected from our house hunt. Like so many other times in this transition, Indonesia still felt like the truest thing in my life.

Living amidst some of Indonesia’s challenges had a way of breaking my heart. Honestly, I felt relieved that I wasn’t there in the smoke, worrying about my kids’ lungs, trying to decide if we should evacuate. I also felt guilty that we’ve got an easier living situation now.

There I was ticking through options of homes on a clipboard, while my friends barely had the chance to breathe.

However, my friends there, their culture, their resilience and joy filled my heart, too. They kept working, kept caring for their kids, kept doing their best to choose life when their world tried to force death on them. And when the rains finally came, and the fires stopped, the plumeria trees filled again with white and yellow blossoms. My friends there were what I really wanted in my house hunt here. I wanted them to live near my house, visit my house, laugh in my house.

They were what made that country of land and sea a home I didn’t ever want to leave.

“Don’t worry, it’ll become home eventually,” my son’s eleven-year-old sleepover friend said when he overheard me sharing with my sister the mixed feelings of our Colorado house hunt. He looked up from the comics to speak to us in between bites of cheese. “And you can make it cute.”

Right. Of course. Home isn’t what you’re given. Home is what you make with what you’re given.

And the beauty? It’s not just found in the mountain views, or the excitement of living among islands and volcanoes. The beauty happens when a place and people fill you in such a way that they shape you, too.

We bought a house in a neighborhood here in this landlocked, semiarid city that, ironically, has streets named with a nautical theme. They don’t seem to belong. We don’t yet either. But maybe it’s a reminder that islanders and mountain-dwellers can live together quite nicely.

My daughter got her stairs. My older son got his sleepovers as soon as we got the sheets and pillows unpacked. My younger son will probably enjoy his share of rainbows here on the edge of those fierce summer storms. The thing that my husband and I most noticed when we walked in for the first time wasn’t affordability or Asian cooking. It was how bright the inside of the house was.

Big windows. Light. Sky. The ability to see out all directions. I let out a breath I didn’t know I’d been holding. Those hadn’t made the list. But they were every reason why we chose it.

Sometimes I sit in my new house and feel every bit of the distance from the life we lived on the other side of the world.

Sometimes, though, an Indonesian friend texts, sends a picture, and I can see what her sky looks like over there. At the same time, I can look out at this sky from inside of the house I chose here.

The longing is often still there, big, present, raw. But so is the beauty, and the space, opportunities, and joy it brings.

And so, I choose hope.

Rebecca Hopkins spent the first half of her life moving around as an Army kid and the past fourteen years trying to grow roots on three different Indonesian islands while her husband took to the skies as a pilot. She now works in Colorado for Paraclete Mission Group and writes about issues related to nonprofit and cross-cultural work. Trained a journalist and shaped by the rich diversity of Indonesia, she loves dialogue, understanding, and truths that last longer than her latest address. www.rebeccahopkins.org https://www.paraclete.net/associate/ rebecca-hopkins/

Rebecca’s son, Eric, in Indonesia.

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Let’s fly with haste away to that white Moon The ugly truth is always far too nigh We’ll take a rocket, casting fiery plumes Pursuing faithless worlds we can’t espy I hate this contrast wrought by loveless fear They beg I stay, but no! I’d rather die Control, you read me? Engines primed and clear I have no home. We’ll craft one quaint and grand The rockets blaze, we reach the stratosphere But what awaits upon that cold, grey sand?

Pure angels sent from God’s diving triune Perhaps the wailing souls of those he damned Devoid of hope, beneath that ebbing lune Let’s fly with haste to our white Moon

Kerith Thomas has lived in St. Petersburg, Russia for thirteen years (with a short hiatus in Budapest). She is soon returning to America for college and performed this poem at a TCK conference as an expression of the transition period she and her peers would be going through.

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Full Circle

By Naomi Hattaway

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n 2014, after five years of living abroad in New Delhi and Singapore with our family of five, we repatriated to the United States—Florida to be exact. While Florida wasn’t the state we previously called home, we quickly established ourselves and found our place in our neighborhood and among the people of Orlando.

While living in Orlando, I suffered the repatriation blues and subsequently put pen to paper to discuss all of my feelings.

Out of that post came the evolution of I Am A Triangle, a global online community for individuals living outside of their passport countries, which to this day is one of the kindest online community spaces for expatriates.

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As one does when you live a life of multiple homes, we soon found ourselves in northern Virginia, and then Columbus, Ohio. One day less than a year later, without warning, we went through an unexpected and sudden job loss, and we found ourselves having to completely reinvent our lives.

When my husband’s position was eliminated, we rode the scary wave of “what next” for three months. When you’re having fun and living your best life, three months can fly by all too quickly.

When you’re in a period of unknown and uncertainty—let me tell you—three months can feel a lifetime.

Added to the uncertainty of the future, the feelings of dread related to moving

again (or once again living a commute lifestyle) flooded every single one of my waking moments.

Obviously, I knew that everything would be all right in the end, but it was such uncharted territory for us as my husband had never been without employment before. It was also new to me as I found myself needing to balance support needs for him, keeping my own sanity, and maintaining and keeping things afloat (not to mention the added “togetherness time” that I wasn’t accustomed to).

Fast forward to the day that my husband was offered a position for new employment. Hooray! I thought. This is wonderful. Finally. Resolution and relief.

Except that the position was located in my hometown (my actual “home home”) of Omaha, Nebraska. I’d left Omaha nearly fifteen years prior and had no intentions of ever moving back.

But alas, the position was right for my husband, and the family needed to have reliable income, so we moved the family to Nebraska in December of 2017. One thing I quickly

learned? Repatriation is not only difficult from one country to another—it’s also quite difficult from one city to another in the same locale.

When we moved, I struggled immensely. However, one thing remained obvious and true: I had been given (yet again!) an opportunity to accept my new reality and learn how to thrive in the midst of my circumstances. To say I’m completely a different person now as compared to fifteen years ago is an understatement. I’m now married, have two additional children, have built two businesses, have volunteered with organizations, and have met amazing people. I’ve seen the world, traveled, and explored, and my worldview has been massively expanded.

When I traveled back “home” to hunt for schools and a new house, I dreaded

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it, as that change that’s happened in me over the past fifteen years would likely create chasms between me and the friends I left behind. I felt that bridging the gap between those who stayed and me (who left) would be difficult. I reached out to some of those dear friends with whom I’ve stayed in contact over the years to ask for lunch dates and happy-hour meetings, and guess what? I discovered that they are completely different people as well!

What a humbling lesson to realize that I’d not been giving “the stayers” the benefit of the doubt. The assumption is we (who have left) have done all of the expanding and changing, and that those we’ve left behind have remained the same

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individuals as they were when we jaunted off on our adventures.

I was initially a bit bitter about being back in a place I was happy to have left, and added to that, I was required to completely start over with all new classes and accreditation mandatory to continue my real estate career. At the time, I wrote a blog post about my full-circle moment —you see, when I was just nineteen years old, I was the recipient of a Habitat for Humanity home in Omaha. I was the young, single, and unwed mother of a little boy and needed a hand up.

Crazily enough, the executive director of Habitat Omaha read my blog post! She was on staff twenty-plus years ago when I received my house, and she called to ask for a coffee date so we could catch up. What happened next is a thing of kismet and beauty.

Habitat Omaha had an opening in their homeownership department and she asked me to apply for the job. I turned it down originally because I had just gotten my footing with my real estate license, but eventually she won out and I began impacting the affordable housing space in 2018 as an employee of Habitat for Humanity Omaha. Truly full circle! Pinch me!

During my tenure at Habitat Omaha, I was responsible to oversee the

Habitat Omaha team in areas such as homeownership, foreclosure prevention, neighborhood revitalization, and budget and credit counseling, as well as the land acquisition committee. I grew to love the task of leadership development with each of them, as well as dreaming how to increase homeowners’ chances at success with the program. I also served on the leadership team, and I consistently sought to impact the entire organization with culture checks and holding ourselves accountable to the higher mission, as well as upholding our responsibility to truly impact and improve our city, one street at a time.

While I have moved on to new ventures (consulting, for one), I am still very much entrenched in the world of community development, seeking to find the balance of affordable housing for all.

I am also still in the real estate business as clients are referred to me (if you ever find yourself in need of an introduction to a relocation agent/realtor, I know really great people literally all over the world!).

I am eternally grateful for my opportunity to serve with Habitat Omaha. My days are still filled with on-the-ground community building as I seek to connect the dots with local organizations doing good in the world, and challenge everyone to think bigger when it comes to power, wealth distribution, and the legacy of home ownership.

When moving from place to place, it’s easy to focus only on yourself and who you will become as you assimilate into your new home. But there are also critical lessons to be learned as you find yourself on a journey back home. You can learn from those you left behind and appreciate

the power of their willingness to hold down the fort. You can discover ways to slot yourself into organizations and opportunities that were created by those who stayed.

It’s good to be back home. I’ve softened in my ways the longer I’ve lived here. I don’t tell as many stories of our time abroad and I find myself settling in to reliving the days of my childhood, where I grew up just a few hours from my current home. I quite like it this way, this current place of being back home again.

Naomi Hattaway is the founder of I Am A Triangle (http://iamatriangle. com), an international social network with thousands of global members who share in common a life lived away from their passport countries. IAAT offers in-person gatherings in 70+ international cities and is a one-stop-shop for resources, expert advice, and more. She also owns 8th & Home Relocation (https://8thandhome. com), a nation-wide network matching families on the move with relocation professionals. After living in several locations in the United States, her family moved to India where she learned to thrive in the midst of chaos. Following one year in Singapore, they moved back to the United States, and traipsed from Florida to Virginia and now, Ohio. Naomi is passionate about community building and empowering others to thrive, not just survive, in the places they call home. You can find Naomi on Instagram (https://instagram.com/ naomihattaway) or her website (https://naomihattaway.com).

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Going back was like losing it all over again.

Addressing Home

By Hadassah Winters Lampron

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lease list all addresses where you’ve resided for at least eight weeks. I groaned. Immigrating to Canada via spousal sponsorship was mostly a long process of filling out tedious forms like this one. When I saw it only required a record of residences after my eighteenth birthday, I sighed in relief. At age twenty-one, I was looking at a threeyear period. I listed eight addresses. None of them felt like home.

My passport is American, but I grew up in Senegal and called it home for sixteen years. Even after we left Dakar, Senegal’s capital, in 2014, it remained the place I most strongly identified with the word “home.” When I received a scholarship to study in Dakar for a semester in 2018, I felt a sense of comfort. I thought going back would feel like going home.

It only took a few days in Dakar to realize that while it was familiar, it wasn’t home. I was there temporarily as a student. There was no sense of permanence. My international friends were no longer there. Some of my Senegalese friends had moved to other cities. New highways, new buildings, new businesses that bought out the old…the city had grown without me, and I had grown without it. Like two friends who drifted apart, crossing paths again but with only enough time for small talk. A grocery store run-in where you exchange a quick “Hey, how’s it going? It’s been so long,” and an empty “We should get together again soon,” knowing you won’t.

I didn’t want a “ships passing in the night” situation. I wanted hours of earnest conversation over endless cups of tea. I wanted to memorize the labyrinths of alleys, to know the bus routes by heart.

I wanted to learn the city’s gratitudes and grievances, what had changed, what was better, what was worse, and why. I wanted to perfect my Saturday market bargaining, to routinely soak up sunsets from the top of the lighthouse, to leave long trails of fading footprints on the coastline. I longed to say to this city once more, “I know you, and you know me, and I belong here.” But four months is hardly long enough for that.

Going back was like losing it all over again. I lost the physical place when I left in 2014, but now I was losing the feelings I had attached to it for so long. It was hard to accept I had associated home with memories, with times—not place. You can only go back to places.

Why is finding “home” such a constant struggle? Why is it so important? It’s wrapped up with our sense of security, belonging, cultural identity—tied to our very sense of self. We don’t know who we are without it.

After moving to the United States, my sense of home became more strongly tied to my family. I journaled in 2015 that home was “when my family is laughing around the dinner table and our plates are clear, and our bellies are full.” Home was “the game of cards in the living room, trying to figure out why my little sister always wins.” When I moved onto my university campus in 2016, I lost those aspects of home as well. Then my family moved to a different state, and when I visited them on school breaks, I stayed in a new bedroom in a new town where I didn’t know anyone. I felt maybe nowhere was home anymore, and maybe I should just accept that. As the school year continued, I developed deeper friendships JUNE 2020

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and over the summer found myself missing my college friends and professors.

University is meant to be impermanent, not designed for putting down roots, and yet it became home.

I then decided home is wherever people know you and love you, wherever you are welcomed in and made to feel you belong.

For a while, this was enough for me.

In 2018 I spent my spring semester interning in Cameroon, summer semester studying in Florida, and fall semester in Senegal. When I stayed with friends back at my university the week before my December graduation, I was with people who knew me and loved me and welcomed me. But it wasn’t home anymore. I realized there were still people who knew me and loved me in Senegal. I was still known and loved in Washington State where we moved in 2014, in South Carolina where my parents now live, in Cameroon where I spent five months during my internship, and there at my

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university in North Carolina. I knew and loved people in each of these places, too. And yet, in December 2018, caught between all these worlds that used to be mine, I knew I no longer belonged to any of them. I decided home is wherever I am, something I carry with me. But this interpretation fell short as well.

Last year was full of transience, especially with my immigration process. Five weeks in South Carolina, separated from my husband. Three weeks in Quebec. A week on the road. If I was truly carrying “home” with me, it didn’t feel that way.

Now, in 2020, I live in Alberta with my Canadian husband (that’s another whole story). We haven’t been here long.

I’m far from my parents and siblings, far from our loud dinners and living-room card games. Since COVID-19 hit the province relatively soon after we arrived, we haven’t gotten out to meet many people yet. It’s too soon to have a large community here where I am known and loved.

But strangely, within just a few weeks of our arrival, Alberta became home.

Not because I adapted quickly (can anyone truly adapt to temperatures of -40?), and not just because I’m with my husband (though it helps), but because I realized Alberta is where I’m supposed to be right now. I belong here, whether I feel it or not, because I know it’s where God has me for this part of my story.

Maybe home is wherever I’m supposed to be, regardless of how comfortable I feel, which gives me permission to calm the restlessness, to be fully present, to have peace in the stillness.

I’m not sure what home is, but I know how it feels. I’ve tried to pin down the elusive concept so many times but it seems to change definitions faster than I change residences. Maybe pieces of home are found in all of this. The whole adventure. The trans-Atlantic journeys, packing and unpacking and repacking, the celebration of hello and grieving of goodbye. Sugar peanuts and mango tree shade. Lemon rain jackets and evergreens.

Fried plantains in Cameroon, South Carolina sweet tea, lavender mountains at sunrise, snow-covered prairies and icicles under window sills. Hospitality, sincerity, compassion. The hearts that say, “I love you. Let me share your burdens, too.” The God who says “I am with you. I will be your refuge and shelter.” And last of all, the many addresses on my long immigration form, and all the streets and zip codes from the eighteen years not listed. They are there in the background throughout the whole story, a quiet presence in every chapter...and maybe home is too.

Hadassah Winters Lampron has an American passport, grew up in Senegal, met her Québécois husband in Cameroon, and now lives in Alberta, Canada. She’s currently a grad student studying public policy analysis, and she hopes to make her way back to West Africa in the not-too-distant future.

She’s also a singer/songwriter who has written about TCK themes. Check out her music here: https://www.youtube.com/ channel/UCjhqNAbclu__eJ8zF0QdsMg

Instagram: haddie.grace

I listed eight addresses.

None of them felt like home.

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Resilience:

How to Develop a Resilient Mindset

T

By Tim Sanford, MA, LPC

he word resilience is in vogue these days with the presence of the COVID-19 pandemic around the globe. As a TCK you may be adapting better than others to the isolation and enforced changes occurring around us. Why? In part I think it’s because many of us grew up in and around hardship. We know poverty stricken cities, politically unstable or repressive governments, and other difficult living conditions. But…that’s not a guarantee.

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What Is Resilience?

Resilience is the ability to face difficulty head on and maintain your emotional balance; you keep your “cool.”

If and when you lose your balance, you bounce back and keep going. It’s known as mental toughness with the flexibility to adjust quickly to change and misfortune.

Resilience isn’t merely surviving. It’s not about denying the depth of pain and its ongoing impact. Instead, it’s about learning from and growing through adversity—it’s about becoming comfortable with being uncomfortable.

But it’s not taught…it’s trained into you. It’s experientially learned, not textbook learned.

Getting to Know Your Brain Briefly, your brain can be divided into two parts: The Upstairs and Downstairs Brain. The Upstairs Brain is the part that thinks, reasons, evaluates, catalogues things and places value on things. This is the part of the brain we teach. The ability

to be resilient, however, lies in the Downstairs Brain. This is the “fight or flight” part of the brain; where our habitual— mostly unconscious—memory resides.

The Downstairs Brain doesn’t “think” per se, it reacts and responds. You train this part of your brain so when a crisis “stresses out” your Upstairs Brain, your Downstairs Brain automatically responds with the appropriate behavior and attitude trained into it. The US Navy Seals have a saying: “Under pressure you don’t rise to the occasion—you sink to the level of your training.” You rely on the training of your Downstairs Brain.

Training Your Downstairs Brain Want to become more resilient?

Believe it or not, training your brain to be resilient isn’t that complicated, and we already do it in certain aspects of our normal lives.

When you walk onto the pitch for soccer practice, yes, there’s some teaching about the rules and how to be a better athlete, but most of the time you’re training. You practice and practice and practice. You scrimmage hard and the losing side “gets” to run extra laps.

If you’re a musician, you play the same piece over and over and over until you can hear it and play it in your sleep. You then perform it in front of an audience or a panel of judges.

US Military Basic Training is another (very rigorous) example. They don’t teach recruits much of anything, yet—that will come later. They drill and drill and drill you until the preferred combat responses are ingrained into your Downstairs Brain.

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The instructors know when you’re in a combat situation you won’t have time to think; you will need to rely on your ingrained responses to save your life and the lives of your buddies.

How Do I Develop Resilience?

If you want to develop a resilient mindset, here’s how to do it.

This means you need to decide ahead of time exactly how you want to respond in a crisis, so you know exactly what you’re going to practice. If you’re not sure what a healthy response is in a time of crisis, consider the following actions for starters:

Physically stop momentarily, slow your breathing, take several deep breaths. This sends oxygen to your brain so you can be clear-headed.

1. Choose to do hard. While you Relax tense muscles. This allows you to don’t need to become a self-imposed stay flexible. drill instructor, you must get out of your Adopt a slogan that can carry you Upstairs Brain and into your Downstairs through. Motivational slogans from “fight-or-flight” Brain. You intentionsports or combat are endless. Here are ally place yourself at risk of a negative, a few quotes to get you started: Hard is unpleasant consequence by engaging in a stressful situation: sports competitions, good; Pain is weakness leaving the body; piano recitals, high-risk adventure sports. No grunt—no grow; I don’t quit when I’m tired…I quit when I’m done.

This stressful situation must have an Accept the limit of your control. Acelement of predictability and sameness knowledge all the things you can’t control, for it to be successful; knowing what then focus on what you can control and to expect makes the difficulty and pain manage those the best you can. manageable. Even high-risk adventure Adopt a long-term view. Whatever activities have an element of predictability difficulty you’re in, it will end. You live and the level of risk is managed and with hope in something or someone; this controlled as best as possible. helps you see beyond the present circum2. Know how you want to respond. As stances and difficulties. you experience this stressful activity, you 3. Practice, practice, practice. do the appropriate behavior repeatedly; You intentionally place yourself into a even when you don’t feel like doing it. stressful situation (step one); you know the desired response to do (step two); now you repeat over and over and over until that response becomes automatic.

And it’s important to schedule in breaks too. Recuperating physically and mentally is critical to becoming stronger. These breaks are important for another reason. Your brain needs time to get back into its normal Upstairs Brain so when 52

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the next training session comes—or crisis arises—and stresses you, your Downstairs Brain is ready to kick into action and be trained some more.

Being resilient doesn’t mean your circumstances will change; it means you’ll make it through the difficulty without losing your balance and whatever life throws at you won’t exhaust you or get the best of you.

“Tough times never last, but tough people do” describes resiliency. It’s a habit, a skill and a mindset all in one; it allows Tim Sanford is a Licensed Professional you to keep your mental equilibrium in Counselor with over 30 years of clinical and through hard times.

Resilience Can Be Gained We have a stressful situation already with the coronavirus pandemic. Following the steps listed can help you develop a resilient mindset.

If you can train your own brain, great.

Most of us need the help of a friend or a coach to push us into where we don’t want to go—pain and our Downstairs Brain.

If this is you, find another person or a mentor who will take on this challenge with you. For me, it’s been my mountain-biking buddies. We’ve pushed each other to our limits. We’ve suffered, gotten snowed on, even bled. And we’ve become more resilient because of it.

experience. Working with TCKs is a highlight for him, as he spent his early childhood in Ecuador as an MK. Tim is the author of several books: I Have to be Perfect and Other Parsonage Heresies Inside: Understanding How Reactive Attachment Disorder Thinks and Feels Forgive for Real: Six Steps to Forgiving

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FROM THE DIRECTOR

MICHAEL V. POLLOCK

Keeping Your Feet Michael V. Pollock, Executive Director of Interaction International

M

y dad read J.R.R. Tolkien aloud to us as children, then again as teenagers, because we begged him to.

“It’s a dangerous business, Frodo, going out your door. You step onto the road, and if you don’t keep your feet, there’s no knowing where you might be swept off to.”

Those words made me tingle and I relished the adventures that came with a mobile life, even as our family and faith created a stable base of identity and belonging. However, the lifestyle came with its costs, and being “out of sync” was one.

Many adults think about travel and a life lived across cultures as a process of going from passport country X, to international/cross-cultural assignment Y, to “home again” in country X (with perhaps some extra stops in between, if you don’t “keep your feet”).

That was in fact my childhood story, except we returned from Kenya to a new US state, so I never returned “home.” In my adult life, with three states and two countries added in, that reality has not changed.

But my story is simple—boring even—compared to many TCKs. Their first here is different from either of their parents’ here, so that 54

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when parents are “back again,” the children are there. And often a time comes when the children can no longer get back again to the places that feel most like home. Then what?

The stories of multi-national, multiethnic, and globally mobile families become more complex as people move and blend in new ways. Global events like COVID-19 create new kinds of upheaval and disruption until it is a wonder if anywhere feels comfortable, since everywhere must do.

Several thoughts have rolled like ocean stones around inside my head until they are smooth and comfortable, and if Bilbo were expressing them to Frodo he might say, It’s a complex business, Frodo, no denying. You step into the road and if you don’t keep your eye on it, ‘home’ itself gets swept away. And what is to become of ‘self’? But ah, my boy, therein lies your freedom!

Perhaps there is a gift in the TCK life that we don’t often see. What if our unique life forces us to lift our eyes from the soil and where we are born and our assigned citizenship, to look at the heavens and ask, who am I really?

And where do I belong? What is the purpose of my multi-colored, marbled, and textured life? There is a freedom in answering those questions unbounded by geography and culture. And if this third culture life is becoming more and more common, it matters that we pioneer into the territory opened by those questions.

Our high-mobility, cross-cultural lives change us but they don’t define us. That is why it matters that we look to something much larger than ourselves and even the

various communities where we have belonged.

Perhaps we can more easily shed the illusion of “stability” based in material things and are free to seek unifying principles.

One key principle in my life for a long time now has been to “Love God and to love others as I love myself.” Love becomes the place where I seek to make a home, where I sense that I belong, and where my purpose becomes clearer. And it is a good thing one can practice this truth imperfectly!

As you reflect on the stories, poems and artistry in these pages, I hope you will take the time to consider the truths and values that anchor you in your journey.

Interaction International is made up of a group of people who seek to practice care of each other, of TCKs globally, and of third culture communities. As my father built the foundations of Interaction, he focused on the “flow of care” that addresses needs throughout the “Here, There and Back Again” process—even when it gets more complicated. We are so glad that you are a part of this community and hope you will find welcome, respite, and belonging!

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Journey Among Worlds with us!

Among Worlds magazine is accepting submissions for upcoming issues. We are looking for original, high-quality writing, poetry, photography, and visual pieces. We invite writers, poets, and artists to submit their work for consideration.

September 2020

Releasing: Living Fully and Letting Go Submission deadline: July 30, 2020

December 2020 Vocation: TCKs and Careers Submission deadline: October 30, 2020 If you or your organization would like to advertise in or sponsor Among Worlds, please contact amongworlds@ interactionintl.org.